In an internal email from Activision, an executive stated that the prototype of the new Nintendo Switch would have performance equivalent to that of the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The document sent from a briefing by Nintendo itself would be to guarantee Actvision that it would be possible to develop more of the company’s games for the new console, without the limitations of current hardware.
The email was one of those revealed in Sony’s lawsuit trying to block Microsoft’s purchase of Actvision. Among the contents described would be the hardware design of the new console, and a summary of the technical specifications of the prototype at the time.
To run almost anything
The information confirms rumors that the successor to the Nintendo Switch would be in advanced development. However, the comparison with last generation consoles seems to be outdated.
At the time, Nintendo was still supposedly working with the Nvidia Tegra T239 chip, which, in fact, would guarantee similar performance, or even a little better than the PS4 and XOne. This would be enough to radically expand the scope of games that could be developed for the Switch 2, compared to the current model’s hardware.
However, recent leaks suggest that this SoC would have been replaced by a much more modern MediaTek chip, in addition to the GPU having been updated from the Ampere architecture to Ada Lovelace, bringing the latest Ray Tracing and graphics acceleration technologies via AI.
Nintendo has not commented on the matter, but it wouldn’t be surprising if more up-to-date details were also revealed in Sony’s lawsuit against Microsoft. The legal action has already served to confirm the “console war”, aggressive practices to guarantee title exclusivity, in addition to Microsoft’s own motivation to invest more resources in Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud services.